The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, the approaches described in this section may not be prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Conventional image forming devices, such as printers, copiers, facsimile machines and multi-function peripheral (MFP) devices have inherent limitations relating to security and content optimization. For example, with respect to security, image forming devices conventionally process entire pages of printed documents, even if particular pages of documents contain sensitive information, such as social security numbers, dates of birth or credit card numbers. To the extent that security measures are implemented, it is usually done at the device or user level. For example, a device may be configured to disallow certain functionality. As another example, only certain users may be authorized to use particular devices, or particular functions of devices. User-level authorization is conventionally enforced by authenticating users using an identification card, RFID tag, or a user entering an identification and password into a operation panel of a device. With respect to content optimization, conventional image forming devices process a document without any content optimization. For example, conventional image forming devices do not consider whether the foreground or background color of a document matches the print paper color or whether the background color dominates the foreground contents, making the foreground contents unreadable. Based upon the foregoing, an approach for processing documents at image forming devices that does not suffer from the limitations of conventional image forming devices is highly desirable.